Strategies To Cope With Client Overload

February 16, 2016

If you’re in the enviable position of having a waiting list of people wanting to work with you and you have all the clients you can possibly deal with, what do you do? For many businesses I work with the biggest challenge is in providing customer excellence to the clients they do have, they can’t cope with more.

But is that any way to run your business?

Your Options

Invest in your operational excellence to make improvements to your operations, thus enhancing your ability to work with more clients.

Stay where you’re at. Some business owners are happy with where they are at and have no desire to grow or make improvements.

Only work with your ideal clients. If you look at your client list I’m sure you have a group of ideal clients, you also have a B List (for want of a better term), and some businesses are still working with the C List … those clients who have you grinding your teeth while you’re on the phone with them. Think about how your business would be if you ONLY worked with your ideal clients, and attracted more of those. In order for this to work – a warning, you need to get tough (and I’m talking “your fired“) with your C List and look at phasing out your B List.

Increase your resources. This may mean building your team and upscaling your business in order to increase turnover. Note: before doing this I strongly suggest you work through option 1.

Look at ways you can leverage your existing clients, your waiting lists or databases. For example, if you’re a coach offering one-on-one coaching sessions, could you adapt some of your resources and provide a lower priced online course which will help prepare your waiting list clients for your one-on-one programme. Moving away from ‘selling time’ is something I’m seeing so much of as business owners look at creating multiple income streams for their various tiers of clients.

Change your marketing so your sales funnel is a longer process. Look at attracting prospects at the start of their enquiries as opposed to their being ready to purchase. This will ultimately increase your conversion rate as the longer sales funnel takes more time to build a relationship and establish trust, plus a well thought out inbound marketing campaign means you set the pace.

Actions

Pick 3 of the above options and write down a list of pro’s and con’s for each.

Finally, draft your to-do list of what needs to happen for you to achieve this goal.

Ask for help with your to-do list (you don’t need to climb a mountain by yourself). What’s on your to-do list you can delegate to your existing team? Who do you need to bring in to get things done? What experts would make this process easier / more efficient / add value?

Finally

Your business should now be in a much better position for growth (if growth is your choice). If you’re anything like me, just knowing you have a plan in place is huge and reduces some of that noise that keeps you up all hours!

What about you? When you’re so busy with existing clients do you tend to put the blinkers on, or are you a planner?